Hermit Romance

(Not about my marriage. Maybe next time.)

From Poustinia, by Catherine deHueck Doherty

Someone asked me recently, “What is fun for you, exactly, about hermits?”  

An interesting question. “Hermit” doesn’t typically make most people think: “fun!”  

The working title of my second book was Lent with Hermits (sort of a joke). As we were determining the real title, the sales and marketing committee let me know that that “hermits” did not market well. I continue to get a real kick out of that. I still managed to get “hermits” in the subtitle, but the word probably makes most people imagine grumpy old men, misanthropic recluses, or the Unabomber. (We went with Holy Solitude: Lenten Reflections with Saints, Hermits, Prophets, and Rebels)

When I think of the word “hermit,” I see a small house or a room, mostly empty, a place to sit and think, with a window to look out on the world, and lots of quiet and silence. (Picture above is a close approximation, from the cover of Poustinia: Encountering God in Silence, Solitude, and Prayer, by Catherine de Hueck Doherty, a very active contemplative and a friend of Thomas Merton.)

I have read a lot of books by hermits who lived in places that sound just like that. Karen Karper Fredette, learning to live on her own in a leaky, troublesome cottage in the mountains of West Virginia. Sara Maitland, immersing herself in silence (while smoking lots of cigarettes) out on the moors of northern England. Verena Schiller, living in a shack by the ocean in Northwest Wales with a view of an ancient “holy isle” called Enlli. Thomas Merton, starting in a little tool shack in the woods then moving into a hermitage even further out in the woods. Barbara Erakko Taylor, driving around the country in her hermit RV and finally settling down in a suburban house.

There is a lot of fun in all these little dwellings and these images of people going off to remote places to be alone with the Alone.

But romance can be distracting. We get caught up in the idea or image instead of focusing on the substance of daily life. I don’t want to delight so much in tiny houses, or throwing out all our possessions and furniture, or selecting the perfect icons for my walls, that I spend more time on stuff or shopping than on prayer, silence, reading, or writing!

But romance is not wrong.

When I was in seminary, an Episcopal monk from the Order of the Holy Cross came to spend a few days with us. Timothy Jolly (best name ever?) was establishing a new monastery in South Africa and looked like the Platonic ideal of a monk – white hair, glasses, round face, and round belly. He was thoughtful and grounded, but like his name, jolly. I signed up for a time to speak with him because I was wrestling with a call to religious life at the time (I met Adam two months later). When I talked to Father Timothy about maybe founding my own religious order, I felt very sheepish and silly, and said to him something like, “But it’s all just sort of hopelessly romantic, isn’t it?”

And he said: “Well, of course it’s romantic!” Then he said something about God, goodness, community, and love all being, in fact, very romantic things. Living in community is pretty hard, I remember him saying, and romance is what helps monks keep at it, day in and day out. He insisted that we need beautiful and idealistic dreams in our lives -- as things to live up to, to pull us beyond, to transcend ourselves.

Having grown up in a pretty cynical, scientific, university community, this was a completely new idea to me. Romantic thoughts could be good? Not silly, ridiculous, or shallow? Nope. Timothy Jolly taught me that romance could be a way to live into who God intends us to be. That it could be a clue to what we most deeply desire – a clue to who God made us to be in this life.

Friends, don’t dismiss your idealistic, romantic, daydreamy ideas. They have something to say to you, even if they never come true in a literal way. I think hermits are fun, which is weird, but also a clue to who God made me to be. Even just a part-time hermit.

I will probably never live in a tiny house where I can see a holy isle from my front door, but the romance of an empty room with a window inspires and encourages me to keep on keeping on, to believe that silence, reflection, and solitude have real value in life, and I hope, through those things, to offer something of service to others.

Heidi

SOME THINGS I WROTE

My husband and I moved to be near friends — in The Christian Century

Read more about my move to Indianapolis last fall, and my belief that relationships are at the heart of what makes human beings happy. — "Friendship is taken for granted, or not considered much more than an accessory, in what most Americans imagine as the good life."

NEW BOOK – Everyday Connections: Reflections and Practices for Year C

Coming in September. Pre-order from your favorite bookseller. A leatherette-bound volume with 52 weeks (!) of modes and methods for praying and reflecting on scripture through Year C of the Revised Common Lectionary (Years A and B still to come). I have found many devotions to be, well, kind of boring, so I have tried to make mine meaty, thought-provoking, and surprising.

SOME THINGS I’M READING

Deacon King Kong — by James McBride

A fun, hilarious novel about the life of a very small church congregation whose characters you may recognize and will almost certainly falling in love with. Oh, and it’s also about public housing, the drug economy, racial inequity, demographic change, and a shooting.

Wait for God to Notice — Sari Fordham

A memoir about growing up in Uganda in the late 1970s, during the reign of Idi Amin, with missionary parents. I loved learning about snakes, driver ants, the horror of dictatorship, Seventh Day Adventist culture and cuisine, and the awkwardness of white missionaries in the wake of colonialism. But mostly the fierce love children have for place and land, and especially Sari’s Finnish mother and American father, truly the heart of this book.